Defining Success Online: Website First Steps

People from all walks of life, from all areas of business, can all have different measures of success. All can have different definitions of success, too.

Some website owners are motivated by revenue while others are motivated by generating leads. Some may even want to convey a message or influence thinking, while others still, may seek to inform or educate.

Whatever your goals and definitions of success as a website owner are, the means to that end is most likely below:

Traffic, and steady streams of it (and much more of it than your competitors in your niche) are very strong indicators of success.

Watching your revenue stream rise, engaging with more people than your competitors, gaining many more brand mentions this year than last…these are signals of website success for you.

The lesson here is to outline your website goals and how you plan to reach them (many of those tactics are written about in this book) and shape your website accordingly. Be sure to make your goals honest and reality-based.

Most of all, make sure your steps to success and your goals are measurable. Setting goals without a means to measure them leads to confusion, error-laden hypotheticals and frustration.

A simple example is a measurable goal such as increasing traffic by 30% over x amount of months. The steps you take to do so should be clear and reachable within a set budget. After your timeframe has been exhausted, make careful note of what steps worked and which need improvement.

The above example is an easy goal measurement system, and screams of common sense. But then again, just because you’re online, or maybe even new to being online with your business, does not mean common sense doesn’t apply. It often does.